UN report says technology key to helping poor

Plan calls for rich nations to team up

July 10, 2001|By Laurie Goering, Tribune foreign correspondent.

MEXICO CITY — Improving access to high technology--from genetically engineered crops to the Internet--is key to reducing poverty in the developing world, argues a controversial new UN Human Development report to be released Tuesday in Mexico City.

Bucking traditional development theory, which argues that spending on basic health and education is the surest route to overcoming poverty, the report pins new hope for the Third World on technology. It says First World advances must be turned to solving the pressing needs of the world's poor, and that rich nations and corporations need to team up to make it happen.

"Technology is not a substitute for work on health or education or clean water. It's often a means of achieving those goals," said Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program.

Classroom education by television or Internet, for instance, may help overcome a dramatic teacher shortage in AIDS-devastated sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America, he argued. Similarly, offering tax incentives to private drug companies and beefing up public research funding to find a vaccine for AIDS or tuberculosis could have dramatic health effects even outside the developing world.

Already, Filipinos have used cell phone communications to help topple a president; Internet access is creating new health networks in Gambia, Nepal and Cuba; and technology is otherwise producing myriad ways to "transform the lives of poor people," the report noted.

But selling the new high-tech vision to international development organizations may be tough, Malloch Brown concedes. Those organizations are angry over decades of not getting enough funding for basic health and education efforts in the Third World and worried about the effects of globalization, genome patenting, bioengineered crops and other advances.

"In the development community, we've built up a basic bias against technology," the administrator said. "We've seen decades of failed silver bullets, that weren't sustainable or were too expensive. That's left the community with a great skepticism about the value of technology. They don't see why money should be diverted to the bells and whistles of Western technology."

Perhaps the most controversial section of the new report advocates genetically modified crops as a "breakthrough technology" for the developing world, and urges huge new public investment to develop drought-tolerant and nutrient-enhanced versions of Third World staples such as millet, sorghum and cassava.

The report says the potential health and environmental risks of genetically engineered crops "can be managed" and suggests that U.S., European and Japanese opposition to modified soybeans, corn and other crops is unfairly threatening progress for the world's poor.

"The voices of people in poor countries--who stand to gain or lose the most from these new technologies--have not yet been heard," wrote Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, the lead author of the report.

But biotech giants, including Monsanto, have shown little interest in developing such crops, largely because the profit potential is minimal. The report suggests the answer lies in more public-funded research, something Malloch Brown calls "indispensable."

The United States is moving in the opposite direction under President Bush, whose administration has proposed deep cuts in agricultural research funding at state universities and other institutions. Many developing countries similarly are cutting research spending; the report also shows that only seven of the world's 42 high-tech innovation centers are south of the equator, with only three in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

Opponents of biotech crops argue that the reason 800 million people go hungry in the world is not that there isn't enough food, but that wars, import prices that undercut local growers, distribution problems and other difficulties keep crops from being grown or distributed where they are needed.

Genetically modified foods "have potential to help poor and developing countries but I stress very much the potential part," said Antony Lavina of the Washington-based World Resources Institute.